Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War is experienced not as a clean ending but as the beginning of a dangerous postwar life. In Madrid, Guillermo García Medina survives under the false identity of Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, and ordinary encounters with police, officials, and neighbors turn defeat into a continuing test of concealment. The victory changes who can move through the city without attracting suspicion, while leaving Guillermo to confront the moral cost he attaches to choosing survival.

The first days after defeat

On 1 April 1939, Guillermo returns to Madrid and takes shelter with Experta. She closes the kitchen blind, gives him her only armchair and a glass of water, and tells him not to worry because she will take care of everything. Her practical help continues a pattern of protection: she retrieves belongings from his home and arranges for them to be transported in two trunks and a suitcase, reasoning that a man arriving with only a doctor’s case would not seem credible.

Before moving to a more suitable lodging, Guillermo tests whether his papers can pass official scrutiny. He leaves early, walks for more than an hour before finding a taxi, exchanges a five-pound note for Republican pesetas, and presents his document at a bank on Calle de Alcalá. The employee records its number and returns it without visible suspicion. Yet even this routine acceptance has a bitter consequence: in a central café, Guillermo realizes that his newly grown moustache and untroubled presence would lead others to read him as a supporter of the victors.

At the hostel, Facundo greets him with the Falangist salute and Experta nudges him to answer. Guillermo raises his arm almost mechanically. Experta does not imitate the gesture; she remains beside him, visibly apart from the greeting. Her composure makes the difference between outward compliance and inward allegiance impossible for him to ignore. Guillermo understands that the war is lost, but this encounter is when he begins to glimpse the price survival will demand.

A defeat carried into private life

After Experta leaves, Guillermo is alone in a dim room with a large crucifix above the bed. He first tries to remove it, then puts it back. His thoughts return to the earlier decision to accept the doctor’s help rather than surrender himself as Franco’s forces entered the city. He imagines going to the hospital, allowing himself to be arrested, and joining the people with whom he had shared the struggle; for a moment, imprisonment and death appear to him as a way to recover dignity.

The impulse does not overcome his desire to live. That night, he measures his losses: his vocation, his work, his home, his lover, and the possibility that his son will ever know he is his father. He is only twenty-five, but he understands that he would rather continue under a false name than reclaim his own and face the consequences. The choice keeps him alive, yet he experiences it as a betrayal of the integrity associated with his grandfather. Survival is therefore not presented as simple relief; it becomes a source of lasting shame.

The compromise takes on a daily ritual. Each night Guillermo removes the crucifix and hides it under the bed, then replaces it in the morning. He walks through Madrid for hours, careful not to cross to the east of the Castellana. The avenue becomes a boundary in his mind between Guillermo García Medina’s lost life and the existence he is constructing as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez. The repeated routine gives physical form to the division imposed by the victory: he remains in the city, but cannot inhabit it openly as himself.

Documents and the making of a new identity

The false identity originates before the final defeat. On 28 June 1937, Manuel Arroyo Benítez registered at a Madrid hotel using papers issued through the Republic’s Directorate-General of Security, but the papers identified him as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez. They described a man born in Talavera de la Reina on 12 January 1904, a UGT member since 1929, married and resident in Valencia; none of those biographical details was true. The identity was created for Manuel’s clandestine work, not for Guillermo, and the novel later makes that earlier administrative fiction the means by which Guillermo can survive the change of regime.

When Manuel gives the identity to Guillermo, he explains how it can be adapted. The documents had been manufactured on paper matching the originals, with a copied official signature and a seal copied from Burgos. Manuel has destroyed the record linking the identity to its earlier political history; Guillermo is to use his real age and a different account of his past. The document’s usefulness depends on the absence of a verifiable record as much as on its appearance. Under the new authorities, a name and supporting paperwork can determine whether a person is exposed or allowed to pass.

At a crowded police station, the same logic is made explicit. Guillermo presents Rafael’s papers at a designated window for exchanging documents from the Nationalist zone. The guard’s manner softens when he sees them and directs him to window seven, where he does not have to wait long. Guillermo watches the exhausted people in the first six lines, recognizing them as the people who defended Madrid with him through nearly three years of scarcity, bombing, and despair. He smiles as he submits his papers, even as he feels the encounter testing him once more. His document grants him access to the new system by separating him from those whose defeat he shares.

Consequences beyond Guillermo

The postwar use of false papers recurs in other lives, though with different purposes and consequences. In Berlin, Jan Schmitt obtains a forged residence certificate under the name Johannes Grunwald, which allows him to qualify for municipal police work restricted to native residents of Schöneberg. With the help of his fiancée’s father, he gets the position; once he begins patrolling in uniform, his prior identity as a war criminal disappears from the people who knew him. The document does more than conceal him: it gives him a respectable public role within the postwar community.

In Madrid, the clandestine support network run by Clara Stauffer also makes identity an instrument of escape. Her house at Galileo 14 becomes a place where fugitives receive food, clothes, help with accommodation, and access to Spanish passports bearing invented identities. A baptismal certificate with German names and a 1907 date is among the papers that alert a household observer to the traffic. The network’s practical care and its assistance to fugitives exist side by side: the same capacity to shelter people and supply documents can preserve lives while helping men escape consequences for their pasts.

Through these parallel outcomes, the victory is shown as a reordering of legibility rather than merely the end of fighting. Guillermo’s assumed name shields a defeated Republican from the authorities, while other forged identities hide men wanted for crimes. In the first case, the papers answer an immediate threat to survival; in the later cases, they help fugitives establish new lives. The recurring document thus carries no fixed moral meaning: its consequences depend on who is hidden, from whom, and for what purpose.